


Traveled All This Way (Just to See You Again)

by pyromanicofthesea



Series: AbsoluteControlShipping Week 2020 [2]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Absolutecontrolshipping Week, Adventures in Turnback Cave, Cyrus is also sentimental, Giovanni is sentimental, Light Angst, M/M, Yabureta Sekai | Distortion World (Pokemon)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:46:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25022614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyromanicofthesea/pseuds/pyromanicofthesea
Summary: Day Five: KissGiovanni receives a call informing him Cyrus has disappeared. He agrees to help locate him. He didn't even get to say goodbye.
Relationships: Akagi | Cyrus/Sakaki | Giovanni
Series: AbsoluteControlShipping Week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1811884
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Traveled All This Way (Just to See You Again)

When he received the call from Mars, the last thing Giovanni had expected was to hear her voice distraught over the line. She spoke a million miles a minute, but what information Giovanni was able to discern made him frown. Something about a mysterious portal, a shadow monster, and Cyrus was missing.

“Mars, Mars,” Giovanni said, trying to get a word through the Galactic Commander’s frantic spiral of panic. “Mars, I’ll be on the next flight to Sinnoh. Wherever Cyrus is, we’ll find him.”

The flight over felt like it took days. It was four hours long, including boarding and landing. It still felt like it took days. Giovanni stepped out onto the runway, and Mars in her sudan was waiting for him. He put his suitcase in the back seat. It wasn’t terribly large considering this trip could take some time, but he hadn’t particularly thought that far ahead when he packed. All he could think about was finding Cyrus.

“Where was he last seen?” Giovanni asked. Mars had a colder demeanour than she usually did, though he chalked that up to grief. She held onto the steering wheel tight enough that her knuckles were tinged with white.

“Mt. Coronet,” she said, not taking her eyes off the road. She couldn’t look at Giovanni, he was too close to Cyrus. Saturn too, though he seemed to be taking the Boss’s words to heart. The Boss was a fool if he thought his Commanders wouldn’t go looking for him. “At the Spear Pillar. He summoned the Pokemon gods of time and space and then he-” her voice trailed off, and Giovanni did his best to give her compassion. It was not something he was used to.

“It’s alright, Mars. I need to know what happened next.”

“He vanished,” she said after a long moment of silence. “This creature came in through some sort of, a shadow or, or a wormhole or, something. It looked like a Pokemon, but its cry was so, so, it had to be otherworldly. Cyrus was dragged into the, the whatever it came from, and it vanished.” This sounded far beyond what Giovanni had conducted in the past. He would need to call in a few favours, but it would not matter a bit. Cyrus was missing, he needed to be found, it was as simple as that to him.

“We’ll go to the Spear Pillar first thing in the morning,” Giovanni said, and the rest of the car ride back to Veilstone was in silence.

Saturn tried to stop them at first. The Boss's last instructions had been to not go and find him, and Saturn was about as loyal as one could get. If Cyrus said no, it was no, and as far as Saturn was concerned, that was that. Mars didn't have the same type of loyalty. She was loyal, of course, she was plenty loyal to Cyrus and to his cause, and she knew the entire time what he was planning on doing. She agreed with him. She didn't agree with where Saturn took Team Galactic and the enterprise they hid under though, and so she sought to find Cyrus and convince him to make a perfect world in their original world. That, to her, was where Giovanni came in. The one contact in Cyrus's phone. The phone Cyrus guarded like a dog. The one man Cyrus ran off in the middle of the night for. Giovanni would play a key role in bringing Cyrus back. At least, that's what Mars hoped.

So far, it would seem that Mars’s hope was well-placed. Giovanni convinced Saturn to at least let them use the research facility to reconstruct what Cyrus had done at the Spear Pillar. Despite Saturn’s agreement, he didn’t participate in any part of it. While Mars knew Saturn had been entrusted with details no other admin had, she hoped it wouldn’t be necessary for hunting down their Boss and bringing him home.

“It looks like Cyrus engineered a psychic trapping system using the red gems of the lake Pokemon,” Giovanni said, Cyrus’s notebook in hand. “If the device is still here, we would use it to resummon the god Pokemon Cyrus had, and try to duplicate the results. Or better yet, summon whatever took Cyrus in the first place.”

“You mean the Red Chain? Cyrus only made two of them, so unless they survived everything that’s happened,” Mars’s voice trailed off as she crossed her arms. Giovanni understood what she meant. This was going to be more difficult than he thought, and he already knew nothing about it was about to be easy. He turned back to the computer before him, setting down Cyrus’s weathered notebook and continuing to search through the digital research files for something, anything, that could give the two a starting point.

“We’re going to need some extra hands on this,” Giovanni muttered, and Mars nodded in agreement.

“There are still some who did believe in the good of Cyrus’s new world,” she said. “I will see if I can organize them again. Many left, but others stayed expecting Saturn to carry on the work. Now that he isn’t, I’m sure I can convince some to follow us instead.”

It was a week afterwards that Mars had organized and brought together a small team of ex-Galactic underlings to help find a way to access the world Cyrus was pulled into and bring him back. They weren’t exactly the greatest band of cohorts Giovanni had worked with, but they had invaluable know-how of the progress of the Red Chain.

“Leader Giovanni, you’re going to want to take a look at this,” one of the grunts, whose name Giovanni hadn’t bothered to learn, called over to him. The computer screen showed various charts and readings that could not be considered normal, even to someone who had no clue what they were looking at.

“Where are you getting these?” Giovanni asked, looking over two specific readings of detected anomalies.

“Just east of Route 214, sir,” the grunt reported. “But, I can’t find the location on any map or aerial surveillance footage.”

“Mars,” Giovanni called over to the admin, who was working on her own computer. She gave a sound of acknowledgement. “What’s east of Route 214?” She stopped what she was working on to turn and give Giovanni a confused look.

“It’s nothing but dense forests until you reach the coastline,” she said, as if that information was the most obvious in the world.

“Something is bending space-time within those forests then,” Giovanni said. “Pack your gear, we need to investigate this.” He walked out of the room without another word, leaving the underling and Mars sitting in their chairs, speechless.

When Mars had said dense forests, Giovanni had anticipated thick underbrush and trees with canopies so interlocked that one could not see the sky above. What he hadn’t expected were miles upon miles of fir trees, with limbs and branches interlocked so low that it took two underlings each to push the branches apart so the party of five could get through. Needless to say, it took nearly seven hours before anything promising was found.

They reached what looked like the end of the forest, into a small clearing at the base of a mountain, hidden by the trees surrounding it. Something about that place made Giovanni’s skin crawl. It felt unnatural, as if no one was actually supposed to find the clearing. He hated it, but his gut told him to scale the mountainside. He could, at least, see the top of it from where he stood, and that gave him a small fraction of reassurance. A very small fraction.

"Set up the climbing gear," Giovanni said to the underlings, who stood behind Mars awaiting command.

"You heard him, let's go," Mars said, with more authority than Giovanni had ever heard from her before. His lips twitched with the threat of a smile. He knew Cyrus's commanders cared about him - something he didn't understand - but he hadn't realized the depth of their loyalty until now. Had this been what his own underlings had tried to do with their failed Johto takeover? Perhaps. Perhaps then, he would return the favor, and resurrect Team Rocket to a new, higher stature. Giovanni watched as the gear was set up and a basecamp on the ground was established, and decided that finding Cyrus was his priority for the time being.

A fourth, hidden lake was not on the list of things Giovanni expected to find, and yet here he was, standing on a dock to nowhere above a crater lake at the center of what he first thought was a lone mountain. There was what looked to be a cave entrance on the other side, down by the water. That seemed like as good of a place as any to survey first.

The two underlings who scaled up with Mars and Giovanni set up a support line on the other side so the two could get down to the cave entrance. They worked in silence, and Giovanni tried to hide his anticipation. He hoped that somewhere in this strange place, he would be able to see Cyrus again.

The cave was more of a temple, and the air inside felt strange. It wasn't stifling or heavy, but it made the hair on the back of Giovanni's neck stand on end regardless. The entrance room looked to be made of stone, the same stone that made up the Solaceon Ruins. In front of the entrance was a large structure, with something carved into the face of the structure’s smooth surface. As Giovanni took a closer look, he was able to read out what the inscription said.

“Mars, come look at this,” Giovanni called over to her. “Part of the inscription is worn away, but it’s still readable.”

‘...Past three pillars...to the sleeping… ...before 30 is surpassed…’

Mars read the inscription again, and checked one of the mobile readers. She frowned at the digital display as the notification chime pinged, echoing through the empty chamber. Giovanni gave her a look, but she didn’t notice it as she tried to make sense of the readings.

“The traceable anomaly has become, well, less so,” she finally said, still not looking up from the device.

“Meaning?” Giovanni asked, and hoped he didn’t let on that he feared the worst.

“We’re inside the anomaly right now,” she said, and she finally looked up at him. “And it’s no longer fluctuating. If these readings are correct, we’re outside of a stable space-time environment.”

“Then we must be getting closer.” Giovanni looked around at the chamber’s walls. He could barely see the frame of doorways on the upper level. “Let’s go,” he said, and headed for the staircase on the other side of the center structure. Mars followed close behind, keeping an eye on the still-pinging device.

The two traversed room after room, each one different from the last. Three rooms had pillars in their centers, each with two different numbers inscribed near their bases. The third pillar was the one Giovanni paid attention to the most, though he couldn’t explain why.

‘3

27’

He thought for a moment it was coincidental that the top number was the same as the number of pillars he and Mars had now encountered, but he could not make sense of the bottom number.

“Giovanni, you’re going to want to see this,” Mars said from the doorway. Giovanni hurried over, nearly literally pushing past her only to be stopped in his tracks by the sight of the next room. Set deep into the center of the room, down a staircase similar to the one from the entrance chamber, was what looked to be an elevated stage with another inscription carved into it. The air of the room felt, well, it felt contorted. It was difficult to breath, as if there were a heavy pressure weighing down from the air itself.

Giovanni ran down the steps, encouraged by the room feeling so different from the rest of the already strange space. As he approached the steps of the elevated stage, the air crackled with static. For a brief moment, the stiff structures of the chamber warped, the curvature of their bend following the curvature of what appeared to be a growing orb on the stage. In the distance, Giovanni could hear Mars’s mobile reader sounding off faster than ever, but the noise sounded strange. It was almost as if he heard it underwater. The orb on the stage grew until it became a gaping portal, though what was on the otherwise was obscured by its ethereal churning.

“That’s it!” Giovanni heard Mars yell. At least, he assumed she yelled, for he could not think of any other way he could hear her in the warped void he currently stood in. “That’s the same portal Cyrus was dragged into!”

“Cyrus,” Giovanni whispered. He stared at the portal for only a moment longer before climbing through it.

The ground Giovanni stepped onto floated above what looked to be a rotating gulf of emptiness. The empty expanse below him was an amalgamation of different hues of dark blue, and the ground below his feet held the same color as fresh rust. At the edge of the floating ground, the rock turned to a darker blue color, similar to that of the void below. Similar chunks of floating landmass and rock formations were in every direction, some with spiked trees of strange colors, and others with waterfalls that flowed upwards or perfectly horizontal. The world felt strange, almost like a physical manifestation of trying to focus on a task while one has a headcold.

As Giovanni walked around, exploring the strange distorted physics of the world, he couldn’t help but find it oddly beautiful despite the clear isolation. He leapt onto another platform, and onto platforms that floated downward by his weight, and across floating stones, and enjoyed the distance from the outside world for a moment. He did, for nearly a whole second, forget why he traveled to this strange world in the first place. Cyrus. He could not forget, not after how quickly that man had entrapped his heart. What started as an attempt to recruit the man soon turned into a hesitant attempt to charm him, shortly after he found himself genuinely thinking of the blue-haired man.

When he came across the first waterfall, he was in what he was pretty sure would be technically upside down. The waterfall flowed towards the ground he stood on, but the ground he stood on was up as well. Just as he reached for Nidoqueen’s Pokeball, he heard the roar of a Pokemon further up the waterfall. He looked up to see a Gyarados slither down, someone on its back. When the Pokemon sunk into the still basin of water at the end of the waterfall, Giovanni felt his heart stop.

"Giovanni?” Cyrus climbed down from his Gyarados onto the ground below, and returned the Pokemon to its Pokeball. Giovanni crashed into Cyrus, hugging him tightly. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was prepared for Cyrus to shove him off, but Cyrus never did. Instead, the blue-haired man just wrapped his arms around Giovanni, hugging him back. “It is good to see you too,” he said once Giovanni let him go. “But, how did you get here? Why are you here?”

“Mars, she told me what happened,” Giovanni said, and Cyrus made a slight face at that. It would seem that what Saturn said about Cyrus not wanting to be followed had been true. “I had to come find you, you must understand.”

“I cannot say I am surprised she would do that, but that still does not explain how you are here,” Cyrus said, and he took Giovanni’s hand as he looked out into the void. “Do you know what this place is? We are outside of our realm now. This world stands in opposition to our own. An alternate dimension in tandem with ours.”

“Is this what you were trying to access, when we met?” Giovanni asked, looking at Cyrus as the blue-haired man looked out at the lifeless expanse.

“No,” Cyrus admitted. He looked at Giovanni, and for a moment went quiet as he met the older man’s eyes. “This world is everything I’ve wanted, though,” he added once he found his voice.

“So, I take it I could not convince you to come back to Sinnoh with me,” Giovanni said, sounding a bit disheartened without meaning to.

“No, I do not wish to leave here. There is still so much of this world I do not understand,” Cyrus said, and with a smile he offered his hand to Giovanni. “It is too dangerous to keep a portal between this world and our homeworld for long, but if it suits you, I would love to walk with you back to where you entered.”

“I would love nothing more than to walk with you awhile,” Giovanni replied, taking Cyrus’s hand in his. Together they walked through the warped world, back in the general direction Giovanni came from.

“I am glad you found a way here,” Cyrus said after a while. He wasn’t looking at Giovanni when he said it, and so he missed the light blush that crossed the man’s face. Giovanni sighed, and it reminded Cyrus that Giovanni wasn’t going to be the sort to hang onto a good yet ending moment.

“I’m not going to see you again after this, am I?” Giovanni asked, and when he looked at Cyrus, the blue-haired man could see the threat of tears in the ex-mafia lord’s eyes. Cyrus looked away. He couldn’t help himself.

“It is unlikely that you will,” Cyrus replied, and it took all of his strength to speak. “This place does not coexist with foreign entities well, and the human cellular structure does not-” Giovanni cut Cyrus off with a tight hug. He buried his face into Cyrus’s shoulder, and Cyrus, though confused, hugged him back.

“I don’t want to know about that,” Giovanni said. “I don’t want to mourn you while you’re still here.” Cyrus gave him a look, torn about the sentimentality Giovanni was displaying, but didn’t say anything about it. “Are you happy here?”

“I am.”

“Then that is what I will hold on to,” Giovanni said, and they walked on together.

When they reached the spot where Giovanni had come through, Cyrus was quiet. More quiet than he usually was.

“Do not come back here,” he eventually said, and Giovanni was worried Cyrus was upset with him. The worries did not last terribly long though, since Cyrus grabbed Giovanni by the lapels of his trenchcoat and pulled him down into a kiss. He was surprised, it was truly the last thing he expected, but Giovanni couldn’t help the way he melted into Cyrus’s embrace. When they parted, Cyrus brought his hand to cup Giovanni’s cheek for a moment, just looking at him with the soft smile he wore only around Giovanni.

Before Giovanni could say another word, Cyrus shoved him through the portal, and it closed before Cyrus’s eyes.

Giovanni was spit out back at the elevated stage, where the visible anomaly had ceased now that the portal was closed.

“Giovanni!” Mars’s voice still sounded worlds away, the roar of the alternate world now noticeable in his ears. Giovanni sat up, and was pulled onto his feet by Mars, who must have run over while he was still a bit disoriented. “Giovanni, did you find him?” she asked, her voice eager but nearly begging. “Did you find Cyrus?”

“He isn’t coming back,” Giovanni said, and walked away before he could see Mars’s entire demeanour collapse. He was silent during the entire trek back to Veilstone.

He stood in Cyrus’s old bathroom in the Galactic Headquarters building, shaving before he retired for the night. It was nearly therapeutic in the way handling the straight razor steadied him. Something to keep him steady was exactly what he needed after everything that happened that day. He glanced at himself in the mirror, and caught cold, blue eyes looking back at him instead of his own reflection. Giovanni ended up nicking his cheek as he tensed, caught off guard by the distorted mirror.

“Shit,” Giovanni swears as he wipes the small line of blood from his face. Laughter filled the bathroom. Cyrus’s laughter. The mirror itself appeared to ripple, as if the glass was made of water. Cyrus was much more visible now, standing in the mirror laughing at Giovanni’s carelessness. Giovanni shot him a glare, but it was half hearted. Cyrus smiled, having found Giovanni endearing once again. He kissed his palm, and pressed it against his side of the glass. Giovanni just looked at him for a moment, two moments, three moments, before kissing his own palm and pressing it against the glass.

Before Cyrus disappeared from the mirror, Giovanni could have sworn he saw Cyrus mouth to him ‘I love you’.

**Author's Note:**

> I started working on this shortly after posting [It Started With A Lucky Meowth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24731341), but was inspired by [ViimaTheFailcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViimaTheFailcat/pseuds/ViimaTheFailcat)'s story [It Had Stars On It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24792019) to try and make this into more of a sequel-type story. The connections will feel lose, but there are two other stories to come after this to create a sort of stepping-stone style timeline progression. No promises on if they will be HAPPY stories, that is kekeke
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
